Lord Lofthouse of Pontefract obituary

Geoffrey Lofthouse was left a helpless spectator during the 1984-85 miners’ strike Photograph: PA

To become a miners' MP in October 1978 was to enter parliament in a moment of calm in a decade marked by ferocious industrial conflict. Geoffrey Lofthouse, who has died aged 86, won the byelection at Castleford and Pontefract, West Yorkshire, following the death of the sitting MP, Joseph Harper. The wage restraint established by the Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, and the main union leaders was sticking, inflation falling, the International Monetary Fund seen off. Prime Minister James Callaghan's attempt to push that restraint to breaking point was a year off. And in the coalfields, the militancy promoted by Arthur Scargill was dormant.

Lofthouse represented the miners devotedly. They were the key workforce of the constituency and he had been one himself, starting work at the Ackton Hall colliery in his native Featherstone at the age of 14. This had not stopped the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from seeking to impose its nominee when the seat fell vacant. Lofthouse's success in seeing him off was an act of disrespect that sparked a campaign to unseat him.

However, with a general election on the horizon in 1979, Lofthouse was tough and resourceful enough to get his local party sufficiently onside for him to be reselected from a shortlist of one. At that time, he was seen as a moderate, an impression underlined by his soft-spoken, gentle manner.

In the Commons, he quietly argued for every local and mining interest. In the course of achieving better compensation for the victims of emphysema, he introduced five bills. And he was a bitter critic of Margaret Thatcher's man at the National Coal Board (NCB), the Scottish-American Ian MacGregor, accusing him early on of planning a general assault and dismemberment of the industry.

Lofthouse belonged to a tradition that thought of the strike as a weapon best left hanging on the wall, but periodically pointed to in negotiations. He also believed in proper trade union procedures, which meant balloting the membership. When Scargill jumped that particular gun and initiated the 1984-85 strike in response to the announcement of pit closures, miners' MPs and regional miners' leaders were left as the prisoners of solidarity while sharing an intense dislike of Thatcher and MacGregor.

Accordingly, Lofthouse bitterly criticised police tactics, which included having mounted men making cavalry charges. He also accused Thatcher's ministers and MacGregor's management team of trying to resist compromise and seek the unqualified victory that indeed they eventually achieved. In his view, the government had an essential ally in Scargill, president of the NUM from 1982, who rejected a compromise deal put forward by the colliery union Nacods, involving an independent review body for pit closures. This would have given the pitmen a victory on points, but it was felt to be impossible to criticise Scargill's folly without seeming to break faith with those whom he led into joblessness and debt.

Lofthouse, like many others in the mining world, was left a helpless spectator during the strike and a grieving seeker of mitigation afterwards. In 1985, after the end of the strike, he joined miners marching back to Prince's pit in his constituency.

A critic of further nuclear reactors, he attacked the government's readiness to import coal, the increased risk of injury in private pits and the weakening of safety regulations. It was a melancholy and depressing task for a decent man.

Lofthouse was the youngest of five children. When his father, a farm labourer, died in 1930, his mother and the children were evicted within two days. After attending schools in Featherstone, Geoffrey entered mining as a haulage hand, later serving as an NUM official.

In 1957 he went to Leeds Univeristy and gained a BA in political studies. When, in 1970, he became a personnel manager for the NCB, he moved to the clerical union Apex. He had been heavily engaged in local affairs, serving on Pontefract council (1962-74) with a year as mayor in 1967, and on Wakefield council (1974-79).

Lofthouse's personal life had been stricken at the end of the miners' strike by the death of his wife, Sarah. They had married in 1946, and had a daughter.

He was a deputy speaker of the Commons under Betty Boothroyd from 1992, knighted in 1995 and stood down at the 1997 election, after which he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Lofthouse of Pontefract. From 1998 he was a deputy speaker of the Lords. Mild, competent and steady, Lofthouse was ideally suited to the chair, ignoring its opportunities for personality excursions. In the less strident era of John Major's administration, it was easier for an MP from the coalfield to function in a non-partisan post.

A rugby league and cricket follower, he produced two autobiographies, A Very Miner MP (1986) and Coal Sack to Woolsack (1999). He kept his home in Pontefract at all times, and in recent years had campaigned against hospital closures with his successor as MP, Yvette Cooper.

• Geoffrey Lofthouse, Lord Lofthouse of Pontefract, politician, born 18 December 1925; died 1 November 2012

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